If you want to know the truth, these recaps usually write themselves. Either you’ve got a ho-hum game that only needs a generic rehashing, or there’s a singular moment that leaps out as the obvious focal point of the story. This isn’t rocket science.

And then there’s a game like this one. Do you start with A.J. Burnett’s shockingly successful start? The eighth inning Score Truck delivery? The positive contributions of Alex Rodríguez, Nick Swisher, and Mark Teixeira?

Maybe we should start in the first inning. After folding quickly in the top of the first against Tiger starter Rick Porcello, the Yankees took the field in the bottom half behind A.J. Burnett. There’s no need to rehash the trials and tribulations of Mr. Burnett, so I’ll just sum it up like this: somehow it felt like the Yankees were behind before Burnett even threw his first pitch.

And then he went about the business of building a small fire. He walked lead off man Austin Jackson, but when Ramon Santiago popped up a bunt and Delmon Young grounded out to third, it looked like maybe our fears were unfounded. Maybe everything would be okay.

Nine pitches later, though, Burnett had walked the bases loaded. Don Kelly was at the plate, Cory Wade was warming in the bullpen, and the Fat Lady was warming in the wings.

Kelly took a ball, then laced a line drive directly at Curtis Granderson in center. Granderson took three or four quick steps in and to his left before realizing the ball would be over his head. He sprinted back towards straight away center, but the ball was just a bit faster. He leapt into the air, fully extended his left arm, and caught the ball just before crashing back to earth.

The inning was over, but it wasn’t hard to imagine what might’ve happened if Granderson hadn’t made that catch. With all three runners moving at the crack of the bat, the Tigers would’ve scored at least three runs on the play, and probably four. Girardi would’ve had to lift his starting pitcher two outs into an elimination game, and Yankee fans would’ve died a long, slow death over the ensuing eight innings. Thankfully, it didn’t happen that way.

The Yankees again went down meekly in the second, but a strange thing happened when Burnett took the mound again in the bottom of the inning. He was good. He needed only eleven pitches to retire the side in order on a grounder to third, another back to the box, and a swinging strikeout. He gave up a two-out walk in the third, but a harmless grounder to short by Miguel Cabrera ended the inning. The old A.J. made a brief appearance in the fourth and yielded a lead off homer to Victor Martínez and then a one-out double to Jhonny Peralta, but he recovered to strike out Alex Avila and Wilson Betemit.

By that point he was working with a lead. The resurgent Jorge Posada was hit by the first pitch of the third inning, and Russell Martin followed that with a single up the middle. If you were scripting a rally, you probably wouldn’t start out by putting a catcher on first and a old catcher on second, but two batters later Posada was jogging home and Martin was racing up his back to score on a Derek Jeter double. Posada scored standing up, but Martin needed a nifty slide to get around Avila’s tag and the Yankees were up 2-0.

Martin started another Yankee rally with another single up the middle to lead off the fifth. Brett Gardner slapped a single to left, and they looked to be in business. When Jeter followed with one of the worst bunt attempts you’ll ever see, allowing Porcello to nail Martin at third, it looked like it might be a lost opportunity for the Yankees.

Porcello had been cruising since his troubles in the first, but he had been helped tremendously by a generous strike zone. When Sabathia was on the mound last night, it was frustrating to see the blue TBS strike zone box riddled with pitches on the corners and edges of the zone that were called balls; it was equally frustrating to see so many of Porcello’s pitches land outside of the blue only to be called strikes. It was clear, though, that his lack of control would eventually do him in, especially since so many of his pitches were leaking up to the top of the zone.

He lost a pitch up to Granderson, and Curtis pounced on it, rifling it to the wall in right field, scoring Gardner and pushing Jeter to third. Tiger manager Jim Leyland made the obvious call and walked Robinson Canó to load the bases for Rodríguez. (Let’s think about that for a moment — he chose to load the bases for a man who’s hit more grand slams than any in the history of the game not named Lou Gehrig. Even so, it was the right decision.)

A-Rod was down 0-2 in the blink of an eye, but Porcello let another pitch drift up in the zone, and Rodríguez was able to get enough of it come up with a sacrifice fly for a 4-1 lead. Teixeira, whose postseason average with the Yankees continues to plummet, struck out looking to end the inning.

Burnett faced only three batters in the fifth, then retired Cabrera, albeit on a blistering liner to Jeter, and Martínez to open the sixth. When Kelly singled and Girardi came out to the mound, I was actually hoping he’d leave him in, perhaps the strangest thought I had all night long. But Girardi knew that Rafael Soriano, David Robertson, and Mariano Rivera were easily fresh enough to get the final ten outs, so he made the move.

Peralta was due up next, and he lifted Soriano’s first pitch towards left center field. This play wasn’t nearly as important as the one in the first inning, but it was spectacular. Granderson had been shading Peralta just to the right of second base, but he got an excellent jump on the ball. He was at full speed almost immediately and closed the gap with fifteen strides before going horizontal and making an incredible grab for the final out of the inning.

Granderson lay on the turf for a minute or two with the wind knocked out of him, but jogged off the field and returned to a hero’s welcome and an embrace from Burnett in the dugout.

Soriano blitzed through the Tigers in the seventh on eight pitches and the game seemed to be in hand. After the top of the eighth, it was out of hand. The Yankees sent eleven men to the plate and scored six runs — one on a balk, another on a wild pitch, and four others on singles by Jesus Montero, Gardner, and Canó. Yankees 10, Tigers 1.

And so the series comes back to the Bronx and everything is rosy again. The bullpen will be fresh, thanks to that eighth-inning outburst and Wednesday’s off day. The offense will be deeper and more potent, thanks to the resurgence of A-Rod. The Stadium will be louder than it’s been all year, thanks to the gravity of the moment. Most importantly, Ivan Nova will be on the mound.

So enjoy your day of rest today, but do so knowing that you’ll enjoy Game 5 even more.

[Photo Credits: Andrew Weber/US Presswire; Leon Halip/Getty Images; Duane Burleson/Associated Press]

Down to this.

Derek Jeter SS
Curtis Granderson CF
Robinson Cano 2B
Alex Rodriguez 3B
Mark Teixeira 1B
Nick Swisher RF
Jorge Posada DH
Russell Martin C
Brett Gardner LF

Never mind the praying:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photo Credit: Comic Book Artwork]

Playoff Baseball Open Thread

[Photo Credit: It’s a Long Season]

Saveur offers up Mexican comfort food.

Bill Pennington profiled John Sterling in the Times the other day:

Sterling came to the Yankees’ radio booth in 1989 and did every game, although his 100 percent work attendance streak began in 1981 in Atlanta.

“I have not missed a game I was supposed to work,” he said. “I am blessed with a good immune system.”

Michael Kay, the Yankees television announcer and Sterling’s radio partner from 1992 to 2001, said: “I do 125 games a season, and that feels like a lot. I don’t know how he has done 162 games a year for 23 years.”

In his time with the Yankees, Sterling has had five broadcasting partners. He has worked with Suzyn Waldman since 2005.

A typical day for Sterling starts late because he stays up late. Besides having an affection for TV soap operas, he is a voracious reader of mystery novels and celebrity biographies. He tries to swim every day for at least a half-hour. On the road, it is a familiar sight at the Ritz-Carltons and other fashionable hotels where the Yankees stay to see a soggy Sterling striding through the ornate lobby in a terry-cloth robe, goggles perched on his head on his way back from the hotel pool.

The piece is well-worth your time.

[Photo Credit: Beatrice de Gea for the New York Times]

“Room in Brooklyn,” By Edward Hopper (1932)

And So. We didn’t sleep well, ok.  And yeah, we’ve got all day to wait before greeting Mr. Burnett tonight. Fine. At least we’ve got a game to watch. And anything can happen.

[Photo Credit: Martin Fuchs and Joel Zimmer]

Many of you will remember that our old pal Todd Drew was a true believer. He was a Yankee season ticket holder. Never left his seat once the game began. He clapped until his palms were red, didn’t matter if the Yanks were getting blown out. When the game was over he went downstairs and waited by the players gate. He’d cheer on the rookies and offer words of encouragement to the losing pitcher.

Todd didn’t live long enough to see the new Yankee Stadium, never saw A.J. Burnett pitch for his team, but he was alive when they signed Burnett and was excited about it. He liked Burnett’s arm, in spite of his erratic career. More than anything, Todd believed in Burnett’s potential. In 2009, Burnett did reasonably well for the Yanks. The past two years, he has been lousy. He starts tonight and it is easy to think that the Yankees’ season will be over before long.

But hope is the thing with feathers, not without. Todd isn’t around to watch the game. But he’s with us in spirit and he’d be clapping and rooting until the final out. So should we.

Never mind that glass looking half-full:  Let’s Go Yan-kees.

Derek Jeter banged the first pitch of the night back up the box for a lead off single. Justin Verlander threw a high fastball, several notches below his best velocity. Jeter was ready. Curtis Granderson saw a few more of the third-tier heaters, and then lashed at a high one out over the plate. It’s rare you see a hitter manage to hit a ball with such authority on a pitch so fast and so elevated in the zone, but Granderson beamed it over Austin Jackson’s head just left of center for a run-scoring triple.

Verlander decided that was enough of the mid-90s junk and loaded the gun for maximum cheese. The look on his face said that Granderson was not scoring. And the look was almost right. He struck out Robinson Cano on fastballs of 98 and 100 mph. Cano was blown away. Arod looked for the same treatment, but saw filthy curves instead. And just when he got used to the bend, Verlander flashed 100 again. Alex fouled the first one back. He snapped the bat on the second, but the dribbler to short scored Granderson and the Yankees led 2-0. Verlander struck out Teixeira to end the first and must have been thinking, “Damn, if I threw my best fastball to Curtis, could he have gotten on top of it like he did?”

CC Sabathia staked to two runs should give Yankee fans a warm and fuzzy feeling. But Sabathia was off from the first batter. The umpire gave nothing on the left-handed batter’s box side of home plate, and Sabathia set up camp there all game. When he was out there, he walked guys. When he came over the plate, the Tigers did a little damage. Sabathia walked the lead off man, Austin Jackson, on a pitch that looked to be strike three. He got a double play on the next batter. He walked the next two hitters, but got out of the inning with the 2-0 lead intact.

Deep breath for everybody. It was just a bumpy start. He’ll settle down. He’ll figure out the umpire. He’ll be good. Before an out was recorded in the third, we had our answer. No, he wouldn’t be good. Unable to throw precise strikes on the ump’s corners, and unable to coax the Tigers to chase his off speed stuff down below the strike zone, Sabathia combined a mix of high and out side balls and hittable fastballs at the belt and over the plate.  The Tigers took their walks when given and took their rips when appropriate.

Brandon Inge, the first batter of the bottom of the third, doubled into the left center gap. CC went up 1-2 on Austin Jackson as he tried to bunt Inge to third, but then CC lost the zone completely and Jackson walked again. CC went up 0-2 on Ramon Santiago, as he too tried to bunt, but could not put him away. Santiago ripped a single into left and Inge scored the Tigers first run. Sabathia got lucky when Miguel Cabrera got out in front of a relatively benign breaking ball and rolled into the third double play in the first three innings. That tied the game, but allowed the Yankees to escape the big inning.

If not for the twin killings, Sabathia might have already been out of the game.

The Yankees chipped at Verlander, but never bothered him. Posada singled in the second but was erased on Martin’s double play. Brett Gardner accidentally had a great bunt to lead off the third, but was erased on Jeter’s double play. Gardner and Jeter tried to work a hit and run, but Jeter was forced to swing at a ball and fouled it off. It was not a bad call. On a 2-1 pitch, Girardi expected a fastball for a strike and didn’t get one. The straight steal might have put Gardner in scoring position and had Jeter sitting on a 3-1 count. But it worked the other way, left the double play in order and Jeter couldn’t resist. Jeter singled to lead off the sixth, but Verlander ate the heart of the order for dinner. Strike out, pop out to left, strike out.

I left out the fifth, in which Verlander struck out the side on 10 pitches. No contact. Just one ball away from an immaculate inning. The score was 2 to 2, but the Tigers must have felt that they were in firm control as long as the two starting pitchers remained in the game. Fans on both sides were just wondering in which inning Sabathia would crack. The big guy had little to nothing and little was late for a bus.

But give the big guy credit. He never did crack. He got hit. He let up runs, but he averted catastrophe each time. And when his gas tank was officially empty, Rafeal Soriano averted it for him. In the fifth, Inge looped a single and scored on a deep double by Ramon Santiago. But that was it for the fifth. Defensive replacement Don Kelly dragged a bunt to lead off the sixth. Jhonny Peralta took his turn with a deep double and made the score 4-2. After a sac bunt, Rafeal Soriano relieved CC and coaxed a pop out and a whiff. The game had no business being close, but there it was.

Let me rephrase, it was close in the sense that two runs is usually considered “close.” But the way Verlander was dealing, two runs did not feel close. He started the seventh with two quick outs and just as he was about to settle Jorge Posada for his tenth strikeout of the game, Cy Young became Cy Twombly. He walked Posada on four straight balls. He plunked Martin. With a full count on Brett Gardner, he got beat. Gardner saw six straight heaters and finally had the timing. He served Verlander’s 96th pitch, a 100 MPH fastball, into left center for a game-tying double.

The game had a fresh anything-can-happen vibe for a few moments, but then Delmon Young dinked one over the right field wall. The Tigers should play in Yankee Stadium. They are the masters of the oppo dink homer in this series. It’s hard to complain about that, considering how many dink homers the Yankees have hit over the years. Also, Miguel Cabrera hit the next one 419 feet and had nada to show for it. Still, it sucks to have the series turn on the dink homer.

The Yankees still had Verlander to contend with in the eighth. Granderson took aim at the right field wall and came up a few feet short. Robbie got jobbed on a high strike for the second out. A-Rod worked a 3-0 count and let loose when Verlander pumped a get-me-over fastball down the middle. The get-me-over fastball with two outs in the eighth? 100 mph. A-Rod took his best swing of the series, but only could foul it off. He did stick around to work a walk, but the human pop out machine follows him in the lineup, so all hope was lost for the inning as soon as Alex dropped the bat.

David Robertson hammered through the eighth without any trouble, so the Yankees were facing a tired closer who couldn’t throw strikes needing one run to tie the game. It just so happened that the closer was the same guy who guaranteed that Detroit was winning games three and four. Jose Valverde threw a lot of leaky fastballs (drifting towards the right handed batters), most of them for balls, and looked ripe for the plucking.

The Yankees didn’t pluck. Nick Swisher saw stars in his eyes and popped up a honey of an 2-0 pitch, right down the pipe. Jorge Posada walked to get the tying run on a base. Russell Martin made a bid for the shorter wall in right and came up a foot short of where Granderson came up short. Brett Gardner walked on four pitches setting the stage for Derek Jeter. Valverde woke up. He reined in his leaking fastball just enough to nail the inside corner a few times. Jeter got a break on a close 1-2 splitter (the first I saw of the inning) but swung through a well placed fastball up and in to end the game.

Tigers 5, Yankees 4. The Tigers lead the best of five ALDS 2-1 and can wrap it up tomorrow night.

Justin Verlander was excellent, throwing eight innings and striking out 11. But the Yankees got to him for four runs and acquitted themselves pretty well against the best pitcher in the league. CC Sabathia was bad and coughed up an early lead. He managed to keep the game close, but his performance was disappointing, and a massive letdown for all the people expecting to see the two best pitchers in the league show their stuff. Losing this game was not destined, but the way CC pitched, it was certainly deserved.

Where do the Yankees go from here? AJ Burnett. That’s as bad as it sounds. But facing elimination, the Yankees have no choice but win. So we have no choice but to root them on. Our best did not measure up to their best, didn’t come close, and that’s a kick in the gut with a steel tipped boot. But the series is not coming down to those guys. It’s coming down to everyone else. And the Yankees have a great everyone else. Get Mariano in a game that matters and show this Valverde clown something about pitching and about class.

C’mon Yankees, winning two in a row is simple as rip, boom, bash, hammer, snap. Get to it.

 C.C. vs. Verlander. Top Billin’.

Score Truck, please. Pretty please?

YANKEES

Derek Jeter SS
Curtis Granderson CF
Robinson Cano 2B
Alex Rodriguez 3B
Mark Teixeira 1B
Nick Swisher RF
Jorge Posada DH
Russell Martin C
Brett Gardner LF

TIGERS

Austin Jackson CF
Ramon Santiago 2B
Delmon Young LF
Miguel Cabrera 1B
Victor Martinez DH
Magglio Ordonez RF
Jhonny Peralta SS
Alex Avila C
Brandon Inge 3B

Never mind tomorrow: Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photo Credit: Joe Ism]

David Price goes against the Rangers this evening. Game thread.

[Photo Credit: City Life]

Good new Director’s Cut over at Grantland. Rafe Bartholomew interviews Don Delillo about “Pafko at the Wall.” And then, they offer up an excerpt.

Check it out.

Scorsese’s George documentary airs on HBO this Wednesday and Thursday.

Alex Rodriguez had a bad game at the plate yesterday but he is not panicking. Neither is hitting coach, Kevin Long. Josh Thompson has more.  Over at Hardball Talk, Matthew Pouliot thinks it is time for the Yankees to drop Rodriguez down in the order. I don’t see it happening, at least not yet, but you never know…

[Photo Credit: Farther Off the Wall]

Here is Pauline Kael’s 1966 essay on Brando for The Atlantic:

Brando represented a reaction against the post-war mania for security. As a protagonist, the Brando of the early fifties had no code, only his instincts. He was a development from the gangster leader and the outlaw. He was antisocial because he knew society was crap; he was a hero to youth because he was strong enough not to take the crap. (In England it was thought that The Wild One would incite adolescents to violence.)

There was a sense of excitement, of danger in his presence, but perhaps his special appeal was in a kind of simple conceit, the conceit of tough kids. There was humor in it–swagger and arrogance that were vain and childish, and somehow seemed very American. He was explosively dangerous without being “serious” in the sense of having ideas. There was no theory, no cant in his leadership. He didn’t care about social position or a job or respectability, and because he didn’t care he was a big man; for what is less attractive, what makes a man smaller, than his worrying about his status? Brando represented a contemporary version of the free American.

Because he had no code, except an aesthetic one–a commitment to a style of life–he was easily betrayed by those he trusted. There he was, the new primitive, a Byronic Dead-End Kid, with his quality of vulnerability. His acting was so physical–so exploratory, tentative, wary–that we could sense with him, feel him pull back at the slightest hint of rebuff. We in the audience felt protective: we knew how lonely he must be in his assertiveness. Who even in hell wants to be an outsider? And he was no intellectual who could rationalize it, learn somehow to accept it, to live with it. He could only feel it, act it out, be “The Wild One”–and God knows how many kids felt, “That’s the story of my life.”

A few years after this essay was published, Kael praised Brando’s “comeback” in movies like “The Godfather” and, especially, “The Last Tango in Paris.”

Al Hirschfeld and his daughter, Nina.

Serious Eats finds the best Vietnamese sandwich in New York.

[Photo Credit: Plate of the Day and Serious Eats]

Pete Dexter’s first book report in 55 years appeared in the New York Times Book Review yesterday. It is about Jim Harrison’s latest novel, “The Great Leader”:

To enlighten and to entertain: what else is there? And while good books — even so-so books — serve both functions, if you ever have to choose one over the other, keep in mind that a book that entertains without enlightening can still be a guilty pleasure, but a book that enlightens without entertaining is algebra.

… I would mention that for me, Harrison set the hook deep and early, in a novella called “Revenge.”

There is a scene in that story of almost incomprehensible savagery — Harrison by the way is as good at writing violence as anybody, and particularly gets the weirdness of the incubation period — and he accomplished this particular violence by interrupting himself and manually moving readers to the fireplace mantel, where they could watch without getting hurt.

It was one of Harrison’s moments of instinctive genius, I think, perhaps the only way to bring off the scene without changing the mesmeric sound coming off the pages to something more ordinary, and I mean it as no disrespect to speculate that these moments are in some way out of Harrison’s hands, and very close to magic.

War Stories

By John Schulian

In the space of two and a half years, I got fired from the Chicago Sun-Times and divorced, moved from Chicago to Philadelphia, changed careers, lived through the death of my father, moved from Philadelphia to L.A., tried to get my feet under me in show business, and wound up spending two weeks in the hospital with the back problems that afflict me to this day. I’m not a doctor, nor do I play one on TV, but my diagnosis is that my cumulative stress had to go somewhere, so it went to my back. Of course the problem is more complicated than that, but I truly was wrung out from the roller coaster ride I’d been on. The ride wasn’t over, though. I was simply changing roller coasters.

When I got out of the hospital, I turned down a chance to return to “Miami Vice” because there was a new dramedy on ABC called “The ‘Slap’ Maxwell Story” that sounded like it wound be fun to write. Slap was a sports columnist, which made me right for the show, and he was played by Dabney Coleman, who specialized in self-centered misanthropes who made audiences laugh. ABC had to beg Dabney to do the show, though, and he didn’t say yes until a prickly comedy genius named Jay Tarses agreed to write the pilot and produce the series. Conveniently overlooked was the fact that they hated each other.

They had worked together several years earlier on “Buffalo Bill,” a wonderfully twisted comedy that went off the tracks when it addressed a subject that remains tetchy to this day. Dabney’s character, an oblivious Buffalo, New York talk show host, got his girl friend pregnant – “So, who’s the lucky father?” he asked – and she had an abortion. Ratings went in the toilet, Dabney went through the roof, and that was it for the Tarses-Coleman connection, or so everyone thought.

“Slap” was supposed to be the corrective for all that, but the era of good feeling lasted until the second or third day of shooting, when Dabney announced for one and all to hear that he wouldn’t say a line because it was “sitcom bullshit.” Jay, who had written the line and everything else in the marvelously quirky script, got up from his director’s chair – he was the director, after all – and stomped off the set. The battle lines were drawn.

Nobody bothered to mention that to me when I showed up for my interview with Jay. He was an easy guy to get along with unless you were a troublesome thespian or a network or studio executive. No artifice, no overweening ego. He even liked sports, which wasn’t always the case with the people I met in Hollywood. The business may amount to nothing so much as a boys’ club, but the boys don’t always care about who won last night. Jay cared. But even so, I was caught off guard when he asked me, “Why do you want to do this? You had the best job in the world.”

The way he emphasized “this,” leaning on it almost contemptuously, should have been a warning. But I was still in my fantasyland stage and wouldn’t come out of it until my first official day on the job as one of the show’s story editors. (Story editor is a synonym for writer, just as executive story editor, co-producer, producer, supervising producer, co-executive producer, and executive producer can be.) Jay invited me to sit down with him and one of the show’s writer-producers as they punched up a script that was about to shoot. Encouraged to sound off with any lines I thought might work, I spoke up and Jay put both of my suggestions in the script. Just like that, I felt like I was part of the team. Then Dabney walked into the outer office, talking in a voice that would have cut through granite. Jay scarcely looked up from the changes he was making before he uttered the words that snapped everything into focus for me: “Oh, the asshole is here.”

“The ‘Slap’ Maxwell Story” was cancelled after one season.

When I moved on to my next TV job, as executive story editor on “Wiseguy,” our star, Ken Wahl presented a different problem: self-destructiveness. He had risen beyond his talent and developed all the bad habits typical of too many half-bright actors. What’s more, his tendency to put on weight had the writing staff joking that the name of the show should be changed to “Wideguy.” But blubber and bad behavior, and so-so ratings aside – can’t forget the ratings – “Wiseguy” was much loved by critics and viewers in search of a crime drama that welcomed their intelligence instead of insulting it.

Because “Wiseguy” was a Stephen Cannell production, Cannell is hailed as the mastermind behind it. Not so. He created a classic in “The Rockford Files,” a monstrous hit in “The A-Team,” and such exceedingly cool failures as “City of Angels” and “Tenspeed and Brownshoe,” but “Wiseguy” was his and co-creator Frank Lupo’s in name only. The brains of the operation was David Burke, who came out of TV news, was the son of a New York radio talk show host, and possessed an ego that was even bigger than his talent. Burke put his stamp on “Wiseguy” with a writerly verve inspired by his hero, Paddy Chayefsky, and stories that ran in arcs of four or five episodes, sometimes even more. He created beguiling, multidimensional villains like Sonny Steelgrave and Mel Profit and made them part of the pop culture dialogue in the early 90s. To watch him in action was to see a man possessed by both his work and the fame and wealth he was getting closer to by the day.

Twenty years later, however, you never hear Burke mentioned in the same sentence with David Kelley or Dick Wolfe or the cable grit-masters who work the territory he might have, David Simon and David Chase. I’d feel bad for him if I hadn’t walked into his office at “Wiseguy” office one morning just in time to hear him tell a producer, “I’m a genius and I’ve got the clippings to prove it.” That would be press clippings, of course, and I’m surprised that Burke, as smart as he was, never learned that they weren’t to be believed.

But let me not leave “Wiseguy” on a sour note. Better I should tell you about the show’s garment district arc, which, to my mind, was the crowning achievement for Burke and his mordant, ferociously hard-working right-hand man, Steve Kronish. They found something special inside themselves as they conjured up a tale about fathers and sons and risks that come with rewards that have a trap door beneath them. They didn’t do it alone, though. In fact, they were off trying to launch a Cannell series about serial killers – think body parts in a refrigerator every Thursday night — when Ken Wahl was injured during filming of the first garment district episode. It was Al Ruggiero, our square-shouldered, motorcycle-riding co-producer, and I who had to create an undercover agent to replace the one Wahl played and re-write the script in a weekend. Anthony Dennison got the part when he was still hot after doing “Crime Story,” and the first thing he said to us was, “This is better than any of the feature scripts I’ve read lately.” Burke and Kronish never bothered to thank us.

We were left to find our satisfaction in the performances of the movie-quality cast that brought our script to life. From the get-go, “Wiseguy” had been a magnet for emerging stars like Kevin Spacey and reclamation projects like the doomed Ray Sharkey. I still remember how impressed I was when Paul Winfield showed up at our office in a sport coat and tie and told us he’d just flown in from New York after reading Langston Hughes at the 92nd Street Y the night before. And it got even better when we shined our light on the garment district. Consider this cast: Stanley Tucci, Ron Silver, Joan Chen, and – I mention him last only for effect – Jerry Lewis. We wanted Lewis because we’d seen his bravura performance as the talk shot host in Martin Scorsese’s “The King of Comedy.” What we failed to consider was that movie making is done at a glacial pace and while TV shows are made at warp speed. The mercurial Mr. Lewis had trouble adapting to the lavish speeches we’d written for him. He could probably remember every joke he’d ever told, but dialogue was something that brought him to his knees until we promised to trim the excess from all of his speeches.

For Christmas he gave everybody connected with the show Jerry Lewis watches with his likeness on them. On the last day he worked, he told everybody that doing the show had been the greatest experience of his career. All right, so maybe he was exaggerating. That morning, in fact, when a producer had gone to him with dialogue changes, he had not been the ray of sunshine he was when he exited stage left. “You heard of Jerry Lewis’ reputation, pal?” he said. “I’ll show you Jerry Lewis’ reputation.” Better the dialogue changes should wind up in a wastebasket. And they did.

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